What Do the Diaries Include?

A few days ago, I wrote a post about "Schoolmaster" Jacob Schmidt, one of Catherine's early settlers.  Soon, I plan to write about Athanasius Karlin, another early settler of Catherine.  Both of these men keep what are often labeled as "diaries."  Besides oral history and some town records, these "diaries" are a window into the background behind these men.  I put the term "diary" in quotation marks because these sources are not day-by-day accounts of the men's lives.  Instead, these diaries include the following:

1) Family History:  When these men write these diaries, they are recording their family history, almost like an early geneology.  This does recreate familial relations very well and is very useful for someone wanting to complete their family tree.  It also proves useful for local histories.  For a historian or an outside observer, it offers very little general information about the person.  Why is a family history kept?  First, it prevents inbreeding by family members, since records are not readily available or centralized in these communities.  Seccond, the family history is about pride, talking about what the family did for generations as an occupation, where they lived, and claims to land.

2) Insights into Migration:  One reoccurring theme in these diaries is how these men write about every time they move from one place to another.  It could be a short or long migration.  This helps when looking at immigration to the United States because they detail how they moved and all the procedural hurdles they needed to go through.  That inside story can then be corroborated through other records to complete the story.

3) Harvest Records:  After telling the migration story, the writers often recorded how their harvest did year-by-year.  In addition, they kept tables of crop yields and the prices they sold at market.  While that seems insignificant, it helps put into perspective how large or small these farms were, what crops the men grew, and how often droughts occurred.  This section serves as a yearly logbook for the farmers to keep track of their crops.

It is difficult to tell when these "diaries" were written.  Either the authors put them together at sporadic periods or they sat down to write them in one sitting.  The harvest logs were probably kept year by year, but since these diaries are very short, the longest is 10-15 pages, and often the diaries are titled some variation of "Reminiscences from a Life" that tells me the author is reflecting on their experiences.  In the end, these diaries provide some background, but the narrative they tell is a very specific one.